[zamadatix]

Building on top of a bunch of things works well, and is pretty much what Chromium itself is anyways. Building something "new" that is 99% the old thing so you can add your 1% is a different kind of building, and can't be lumped with the former by default. More powerful extensions is definitely the answer, just not one Google wants to allow.

The main problem with this is if browser A adds feature 1 and browser B adds feature 2 then you don't end up with "Chromium + 1 + 2" you end up with "Chromium + 1" or "Chromium + 2". Repeat for a couple dozen Chromium folks and your single extra feature doesn't look all that enticing anymore. The inverse way of looking at it is "if you're only adding 1% on top of Chromium, it's unlikely to amount to anything worth the average user switching for". Especially since Chrome is starting to push Gemeni natively anyways.

For these reasons, I think Chromium paint jobs are the least interesting thing to happen to browser development in a very very long time. Servo for embedded, Ladybird for "something different", and so on are much more interesting. These kinds of things, as you say, are more to the scale of what an individual browser extension used to be.

[labrador]

I've been very impressed by the open source Ladybird project for several years now. I wasn't up to date and didn't realize it had 8 full time engineers working on it now with project leader Andreas Kling. This is truely more promising than "slapping things on Chromium" and competing with Google Chrome.

I didn't explicity state but was implying that a new plug in archeticture to the open source Chromium project might be an interesting way to add AI features in a more democratic fashion.

Either path still has to compete with what Google does with proprietary extensions to Chrome.

Edit to be clear: Since Chromium is open source, the community could actually collaborate on adding a shared AI plugin architecture to the core project rather than making competing forks. That would solve the fragmentation problem entirely.

[zamadatix]

A "community" collaboration would run into the same problems as Chromium - the companies making these skins want the browser to be based around their product instead of having the browser be the product.